A teacher's view of Newtown shooting: Reduce guns, reduce violence

was standing at the printer, running some classroom assignments through before I left for the weekend, when a fellow teacher asked if I had heard about the shooting.

She told me it involved children. She said 18 children were killed. She said 28 people were dead all together. She said it was in an elementary school.

I listened. My classroom papers spit out of the printer, I shuffled the papers in my hand and I continued to listen. She said she had a 5-year-old and that morning she had been angry at him. I didn’t know what to say. She apologized to me before I left.

I walked the hallways, thinking about what I was just told. Most of my students were gone for the day, leaving as quickly as possible to start their weekends.

One teacher sat in her classroom, talking to a student. She sat on a desk, and he was in a chair.

Another teacher typed the keyboard of his computer. I walked into his classroom.

“Did you hear,” I asked.

He hadn’t.

I told him and a look of disbelief, shock and sadness came across his face in one moment. He Googled “school shooting” and that’s when we both saw in bold letters that it was true.

About two hours south from where we had just ended our day, in another school, in another community, lay the bodies of children and their teachers on cold, classroom floors. We said goodbye, but had not much else to say. I apologized to him before I left.

On the ride home, I listened to NPR and heard more about what had happened in Sandy Hook Elementary School. By the time President Obama spoke, I had made it home and parked my car in the driveway. When the president spoke the words “beautiful little kids” I sat there and began to cry.

But today, I am angry. I am angry that politics keeps us from making real change to gun laws.

As a teacher, I have done the drills and I have attended professional development. We practice lockdowns. We practice the plans and reflect on what we can do differently.

I’ve imagined if the moment was real. I picture someone coming into my class. I imagine lunging for his gun. I grab the barrel, pointing it away from my students, and try to wrestle it away. I tackle him. I hold him down. Maybe I save my students. I fear I cannot.

Some people have suggested that teachers should be armed. I feel insulted by this because it indirectly blames the victims of the crime. It says if only those teachers had the proper weaponry, this would never have happened. Its stupidity – and I try never use that word – insults me. It has a cinematic ring; a hero-narrative that stars Bruce Willis as the principal who saves the day. We have no time for childish fantasies.

More guns result in more deaths; the statistics show this.

If we want to stop this from happening again, we need to stop guns from getting into the hands of murderous men. A recent article in the New York Times reported this: Children ages 5 to 14 in this country are 13 times more likely to be killed by a gun than other industrial countries. And, in 2009, 11,493 people were murdered by someone using a gun, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These numbers speak for themselves. In fact, they cry out to us – and we must listen.

I recently launched a page on Facebook called Teachers Against Guns. For now, the site will be a posting-board of sorts for gun-control efforts and related news. If you are interested in sharing information with a community of like-minded people who want to limit the purchase and use of guns, you can use this site as a forum for that work.

Now is the time to act in any way we can.

Patrick O’Connor, of Holyoke, is a teacher in the Wilbraham-Hampden Public Schools and is a freelance writer for The Republican.